Planning Mechanisms to Support the Supply of Affordable Housing Development
There are a number of tools available to governments to support housing affordability. These tools include managing land releases, income support programs, grants, special projects, housing subsidies and targeted loans.
With respect to the built form, affordable housing development refers to much more than the cost of rent or the purchase price of a dwelling. Other design issues need to be considered which impact on housing affordability in the longer term, such as proximity to services and transport, energy efficiency, the range of housing types on offer and ways to target affordability to different groups (e.g. first home buyers, workforce housing and migrants). Providing affordable housing only has short-terms impacts unless these associated issues are also addressed.
To realise potential solutions to housing affordability, the following five key factors are significant:
- availability of inexpensive and well located land
- ability to obtain a high dwelling yield per allotment (e.g. medium/high density residential allotments)
- ability to limit dwelling sizes (e.g. promotion of one bedroom dwellings / apartments)
- ability to control the resale value of dwellings originally constructed for the affordable housing market
- ability to retain any public subsidies and/or assets used for the affordable housing program for further public housing.
The report prepared by URPS in association with Norman Waterhouse Lawyers and Southern Research Centre of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Planning Mechanisms to Support the Supply of Affordable Housing Development by the Private Sector, addresses a range of barriers to housing affordability while also promoting a number of robust solutions.